


The Newlyweds

by JSevick



Series: The Alias Complex [4]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, Fake Marriage, Hurt/Comfort, One-Shot, Russians, arrow season 4 spoilers, plot shamelessly stolen from alias, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 19:19:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4847249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JSevick/pseuds/JSevick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The meeting with the Russian terrorists is supposed to be simple. It definitely isn’t supposed to lead them back to the suburbs… or into a fake marriage that reveals something very… real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Newlyweds

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on the Alias episode 4x05 “Welcome to Liberty Village,” though you shouldn’t need to know that show to follow this fic. 
> 
> And this thing turned into a bit of a beast, which is why the ending may be a bit rushed... 
> 
> But when I saw that proposal in the trailer, I could not resist. :)

“Are you sure about this?”

“Are we ever sure?”

“Felicity, you don’t have to do this. I can do it on my own.”

“No, you can’t, and you’re not going to, and I thought we already had this conversation.”

Oliver sighs tightly. “We did.”

Rain falls in a heavy, clattering rhythm across the top of their umbrella, as they stand together beneath a streetlight in the park. A few other shadows move through the night, obscured by the downpour, huddled beneath thick raincoats or black umbrellas. But Oliver watches the street, waiting for headlights to round the corner of the street.

He looks down at the head of blonde hair tucked against his shoulder, feels the hand curled around the elbow of his trench coat, and he’s torn between a warm affection and a rough-edged protectiveness that has his fist clenching around the handle of the umbrella. Felicity’s hair is down and straight over the shoulders of her black jacket, her contacts in so that when she looks up at him, her eyes are unobscured by the shimmer of her glass lenses. And her lips are bright red, gleaming like a slick of fresh blood across her face.

Her lips part as she speaks, and he forces his gaze back up to her eyes. “So I’m supposed to be Russian… and just not speak? Is there, like, a reason for this, a story I should know? Are Bratva women the ‘seen and not heard’ types or something? What if I’m with other women?”

“This is not a good idea,” he mutters, before taking a deep breath through his nose. “Just let me do the talking, and we’ll see what’s involved. Be prepared to abort this at any time.”

“Oliver, we _have_ to get to that EMP before it comes anywhere near Star City,” she says, and her grip tightens around his arm. “If I have to be quiet for a few days, I will. I can. I think…”

“Anatoly only got us a meeting with the October Contingent,” he says, naming the group that stole an EMP which could wipe out a city’s electrical grid with the push of a button. “And dependent on us being Russian. I should have-”

“You need me there to disable it,” she interrupts in a firm tone, and he looks into her frown and wants to smile. He’s always found her cute at the worst moments.

“I do,” he says softly. He leans in to press a kiss against her forehead, and her eyes flutter shut. “I’ll speak for us, and if I have to, I’ll explain why you’re American. But we’ll deal with that only if we have to.”

The headlights that flash around the end of the block break through any softness of the moment, stiffening them both into rigid attention. Especially when the vehicle approaches, and it’s clear that it is the large black van they were expecting.

When he steps forward, Felicity hovers half a step behind at his side, both beneath the umbrella and splattered by droplets of cold rain as they walk to the edge of the park. The glimmering lights of the city of Moscow blink through the trees around them, but this area of the city is quiet. Perfect for meeting the leaders of an international terrorist group.

Standing in front of the van at the curb, Oliver watches the window roll down with tension tight across his shoulders, preparing to reach for the gun in the shoulder holster beneath his coat. But the man staring out from the passenger side just gives them an assessing look, expression blank. He’s a little younger than middle-aged, short dark hair and dark eyes, a little shorter and thinner than Oliver but not by much. There’s a careful, collected power in his frame—military training, Oliver guesses.

In Russian, the man says, “Will this road lead me to Red Square?”

“Keep driving. Eventually all roads lead to Red Square,” Oliver replies in the same language. At the end of his words, the man’s eyes narrow as he looks at them more closely, and his eyebrows lift.

“You are aware of our project?”

“We are,” Oliver says simply.

When the man’s gaze fixes on Felicity, Oliver can feel her fingers dig into his elbow, but she just stares calmly back.

“And who is she?” the man asks.

“My woman,” Oliver says, feeling his face settle into harsh lines, his tone sharpening into a warning. Felicity looks up at him, though she can’t understand what he’s saying, and he supposes in this moment he’s thankful for that. “She is very good with computers.”

“They send us a Bratva Captain and his woman, eh?” the man says, but he doesn’t look unhappy about it. Then the man speaks again, and it takes Oliver a moment to realize he’s no longer speaking Russian. “How is your English?”

Caught off guard, Oliver does his best to approximate a Russian accent as he says, “We are able to get by, yes.”

Felicity is looking between the two of them with a confused frown.

“Can you speak without the accent?” the man asks, with a perfect American accent himself, and Oliver does his best not to show his uncertainty on his face.

“What would you like me to say?” he replies, in his own voice, and he can feel this entire situation shifting beneath him like tectonic plates. He seriously considers pulling them both away from all of this, but another part of him suggests that this new path may work in their favor.

“I think that’ll do just fine,” the man says with a flashing grin, and then he looks at Felicity. “And your woman?”

Felicity’s head jerks a little at this sudden attention, or perhaps at being addressed this way, but before Oliver can try and speak for her, she says, “Hmm, what? Were you, um, that is… Did you want… I…”

“Very good,” the man says, his smile widening. “Babbling just like a silly American.”

“Yep… that’s me,” she says, half under her breath, smiling weakly.

The man looks back into the van, and the door along the side suddenly slides open, revealing another man sitting amidst computers, two open seats along the wall. “Get in,” the man in the passenger seat says, as he smiles. “I’m Tom, by the way.”

Oliver shares a look with Felicity, unsure how to feel about this rapid turn of events. Nothing about this is what he expected, and he doesn’t like the unexpected. Though this also means Felicity’s distinct lack of Russian won’t be a liability in a dangerous situation…

But it’s all the more dangerous for being unpredictable.

Felicity just looks up at him, determination written strong across her face, and his chest clenches with that deep well of affection she strikes in him. Sometimes he lies awake in night, the gentle warmth of her breath ghosting across his shoulder, and he thanks the QC employee he can’t even remember, who told him to go to Felicity Smoak in the IT department instead of sending the laptop over to the tech shop. That anonymous person changed his life, as surely as getting on a yacht or John Diggle showing up at his mother’s side or injecting the Mirakuru into Slade or…

Or a red pen.  

Oliver knows she wants to get into the van, to find this EMP and destroy it, that she would jump out of planes or sit beneath a crumbling building or wait for a madman to kidnap her if it would save their city… if it would save a single life. And even when it makes his heart twist painfully in his chest at the thought, it also overwhelms him with how much he loves this woman.

So with a deep breath, he helps Felicity into the van, and follows after. The door sliding and slamming shut behind him is a crack of ominous thunder, or perhaps that’s just the storm outside raging on.

“That is Nick,” Tom calls back from the passenger seat, pointing at the man beside the computers. “He’s going to take photos of you for our project.”

As Felicity flinches slightly under the flash, Oliver looks at Tom and says, “And this project involves us speaking English? Like Americans, for some reason.”

“First order of business, we need to establish new identities for you two,” Tom says, as he hands over a pair of passports. “Something tells me David and Karen Parker don’t exactly spend a lot of time speaking in the Russian tongue.”

Oliver takes the passports, seeing his own unsmiling face from within this van looking out at him from the photo, and Felicity’s beside him. The quality of the forgery is excellent, enough to send a slight twinge through his gut, but this mission isn’t about that. He does tell himself he should pass the information onto Waller, though.

“Don’t worry, everything will be explained to you when we get to Liberty Village,” Tom says, tone pleasant and calm, as if they weren’t all international terrorists plotting the destruction of Oliver’s city. As if they were suburbanites carpooling home from work. “For now, sit back and enjoy the ride. You just became Americans.”

Oliver glances over at Felicity, who is watching Nick at the computers with sharp eyes, hands curled uncertainly in her lap. He wants to reach over and grab one, tangle her slender fingers between his own, slide his thumb across the slickness of her painted nails. As if keeping one hand safe could in turn shelter all of her in his grasp.

But he doesn’t, because he’s a Bratva Captain in this moment and not a love-struck boyfriend, and the unstable surface they’re crossing leaves no room for tenderness. He needs to be entirely focused on reading the situation, on evaluating the possibilities, on making choices that will get them out of this alive…

Whatever _this_ is.

And that uncertainty scares him most of all.

XXXXX

Felicity can feel Oliver’s tension as they pass through the tall fences topped with barbed wire, the concrete guard stations with sweeping spotlights, the men armed with AK-47s patrolling along the street. And then, just as clearly, she can read his confusion as the fences and guards fall away to neat green lawns and streetlights shining golden light across trimmed hedges, single family homes passing one by one with lit windows and flower boxes. Even in the dark of night, now that the rain has passed, this place looks idyllic and smug, and she remembers with a jolt the suburb where she and Oliver rented that house several months ago.  

Her own feelings can be summed up by the faint voice in her mind saying, _Toto, we’re not in Russia anymore_. And it is a gift from a fickle god that she doesn’t say it out loud. Although, in this impossibly strange situation, it might even win her favor.

The van turns slowly into one of the driveways and stops, and as Tom climbs out of his seat, she waits beside Oliver’s rigid shoulders and wonders whether they’ve walked into some Russian version of the Stepford Wives. Even that movie might have made more sense than this.

When the back doors of the van swing open, onto the quiet street and not a firing squad, Felicity takes a breath and climbs out, Oliver close behind her. The air is full of the scents of damp pavement and fresh cut grass, and mostly quiet, other than the chirping of insects in the dark and faint strains of soft music from a house down the block. In every way, it looks like any suburban neighborhood in America, except it’s inside a military camp in Russia.

She throws a quick glance over at Oliver, who’s taking it all in with the same stoic, slightly frowning expression that tells her he’s just as confused as she is—but determined not to look that way. With a breath and a quick closing of her eyes, Felicity vows to do the same. If she can.

“I hope you like your new house,” Tom says, leading them down the winding concrete path towards the front porch of a small home.

A little porch lit by sconces, a two-car garage, and dormer windows on the second floor peering down at them—Felicity once again feels the pang of memories, swamped with uncertainty, and wonders if Oliver feels the same. Living with Thea at the loft has been great, but sometimes she misses the little backyard with the grill, and the sound of lawnmowers on summer mornings, and the creaky step on the stairs that Oliver would have fixed if they hadn’t just been renters.

Maybe their next place, they won’t be. But it also won’t be in some weird commune in Russia.

“ _Our_ new house?” Oliver says, neutrally, as they follow Tom up the path.

“I just hope the guests haven’t trashed it,” Tom says, once again flashing that polite, robotic smile.

“Guests?” Felicity tries not to squeak, since that probably isn’t “Bratva woman” behavior, though at this point she’s not even sure _what_ she’s supposed to be. But guests can only mean people, and people can only mean talking, and even when she knows what she’s doing that isn’t always a good idea.

The front door of the house opens onto a tastefully decorated foyer, all neutral colors and crown molding and fake plants, but her attention is quickly pulled from the room around them to what’s _in_ the room. A small gathering of couples await in the living room, with sweater sets and pearls and belted slacks and golf shirts, all beneath smiles that are both beaming and blank at once. They lift glasses of wine and martinis, drawing in closer as they say variations on “Welcome” in syrupy tones.

Felicity’s pretty sure this is what a cult would feel like. Oliver’s frozen at her side, eyes sweeping the room, probably darting around in search of weapons, though his expression remains vacant.

“Don’t worry, guys, it’s just a bit of an initiation,” Tom says. One hand lifts to graze across the middle of her back, and she struggles not to flinch away from him. “Shouldn’t be too painful.”

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” says a dark-haired woman standing in front, whom Tom has stepped forward to wrap his arm around, her smile as emptily polite as his.

“Um, thank you,” Felicity responds quietly, just to say something, smiling faintly.

Oliver clears his throat beside her and says, “Yes, thank you.”

This seems to be enough to placate at least the initial test, as a few of the others share brief glances and Tom steps forward to say, “Let’s go get a drink in the kitchen, shall we?”

The walk down the hallway to the kitchen, with the murmur of conversation starting up in the room behind them, reminds Felicity of the few parties they attended back in the suburbs. Where mingling was an art form, and she had to tell the same stories over and over again, and she hated the moments where Oliver would drift across the room to talk to the men while she was left with the gossiping women (though it would only grow more awkward to cling to his side). After a while, she found friends, those who tolerated her occasional rambles and graciously handled her slip-ups and unintentional double entendres, and the barbecues and game nights weren’t so bad. Sometimes even fun.

It was never the same as hacking her way through the FBI database while listening to Oliver’s motorbike revving through her comms, but it was fun.

This… this is some strange, acid-trip combination of the two, and she isn’t sure how to feel.

In the kitchen, Tom opens the fridge—already covered with photoshopped vacation photos of them, and she remembers the ones at home that sit on her desk, splashes of color and memory that never fail to bring a smile to her face—and takes out a beer, handing it to Oliver.

“This place was originally Training Sector 56B,” Tom says, as he grabs a second beer for himself. “But the students started calling it Liberty Village sometime in the mid-80’s, and the name stuck even when the government shut it down, and we snapped it up. And it gives us everything we need to do our job.”

“And what exactly is our job, Tom?” Oliver says, leaning a little heavily on the name. They both know it’s not the man’s real name, even if his accent is perfectly and blandly American.

“Well, right now, _David_ , your job is to prove that you belong.” The words are pleasant, the tone and eye contact unthreatening, but there’s something hanging in the air around them that makes Felicity want to shrink into herself. She doesn’t, shoulders braced with Oliver hovering behind her, staring up at Tom and trying to figure this all out. “You’re under evaluation. We need to be sure you can portray Americans convincingly. From this point on, assume that everything is a test. Do you understand?”

Felicity nods, though understanding is the last thing she feels. But the gesture provokes a wider smile from Tom, who tilts his head back towards the living room.

“Alright, let’s go meet your new neighbors,” he says.

She gives Oliver a look before they leave the checkerboard tile and yellow walls of the kitchen, as if she could say with only her eyes that she doesn’t know what this is. His eyes portray the same sense of uncertainty, eyebrows drawn down into a stiff frown, but he says nothing as his hand falls to the small of her back and leads her towards the hall.

That’s when she realizes they must be under surveillance… and this just got that much harder.

The room beyond is filled with couples that could have walked out of the suburb she and Oliver stayed in, if not for the fact they must all be Russians in disguise. And not just any Russians, she remembers, given the October Contingent’s particular requirements—killers and thieves and war criminals, covered in plaid shirts and floral skirts, making small talk about shopping trips and casserole recipes.

Felicity doesn’t talk too much, other than vapid pleasantries interspersed with only a little off-track rambling, as Oliver’s hand clenches in the back of her sweater every time she goes to make a clarification on some point or another. Mostly she just trails off, earning a few stifled frowns or second glances, but not provoking outright suspicion… yet.

When they’re approached by Tom and the dark-haired woman, introduced as Diane, she knows the real test has just begun.

“We are so happy to have you in the neighborhood,” Diane says, teeth white and nearly blinding. She picks up a picture frame from the top of the piano, turning it to show them an image of them in front of the Coliseum—or, at least, their faces in the van atop someone else’s bodies standing on a Roman street. “We’ve always wanted to go to Rome—how did you like it?”

Felicity feels a memory settle over her shoulders, of the women in their suburb cooing over vacation photos, asking about Positano and Bali.

“Oh, it was lovely,” she answers, as though she were back speaking to Christine and Amy, instead of whoever “Diane” really was. “Very warm, that time of year, so a lot of sweating, you know—very important to wear sunscreen, though Ol—David kept forgetting, didn’t you, silly?” She playfully swats a hand against his chest, as his stern face is jolted into a small smile.

“Yes, I did,” he says, voice calm and measured, “but fortunately you always had extra in your bag.”

“I had _everything_ in my bag—always be prepared, right? That’s from the Boy Scouts, isn’t it? But, I mean, it seems like good advice for everyone, I don’t see why it should--” Oliver’s hand grips her shirt, and she stumbles on a breath, “—be just… them…”

Silence reigns for a moment after she trails off, as Tom and Diane’s eyes search over their faces, and then Tom nods.

“Good, that was pretty good,” he says.

“I liked the thing about the Boy Scouts,” Diane says. “But you slipped up on the name.”

“And you could do a lot better,” he says. When Felicity feels Oliver tense beside her, Tom leans forward and softens his tone with a teasing grin, adding, “Don’t worry, we’re not going to kill you over a bad story.”

“Not on the first night, anyway,” Diane says, smiling and nodding as though she’s joking about the weather. But her eyes are cold.

Felicity gives a small, forced laugh, and she can see the close-lipped smile on Oliver’s face give a small jerk as he expels a soundless chuckle.

The rest of the evening passes in uncomfortable spurts of pounding heartbeats and aching smiles, but soon the guests have moved into the foyer to start leaving. Felicity takes the casserole held out by one of the women in green—Susan, was the name she gave—and tries to think of what to say to sound more authentically “American”… _without_ saying how much she hates green beans because of the undercooked casserole she threw up at a Thanksgiving dinner when she was eleven.

“It’s a family recipe,” Susan says, with that same strained smile. “We’ll later go over the recipe.”

The room quiets, as Tom clears his throat, and Susan’s smile falters while her eyes go wide.

“I mean, we’ll go over the recipe later,” she says, and the tension fades as her grin broadens maniacally.

“I, um, can’t wait, thank you,” Felicity says, clutching the casserole against her chest, as though it might be some kind of shield. Because if one misplaced word can cause that sort of reaction, she is _doomed_.

As the others filter out the front door, leaving only Tom and Diane behind, Felicity shares one panicked glance with Oliver amidst the chorus of “good night” and “nice meeting you.” He reaches out to gently take the glass casserole dish from her hands before she spills it out of the plastic wrap stretched across the top, turning to set it down on a nearby table. All she can read in his eyes is an urging for calm, the same careful breaths and easing expression he always uses to soothe her.

But she sees his fingers twitch as he brings his hands back against his sides—because they are trapped here, as surely as if the house were made of metal bars and a rusted lock.

“So,” Diane says, when she and Tom are the only ones left, “it’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?”

“It’s different,” Oliver says. “From our usual jobs.”

“Not to worry, you guys are doing great,” she says.

Tom nods along, and as she turns away to grab something from the other room, he adds, “Just something to keep in mind: we recruited you because you’re a couple—so don’t be afraid to show it. You seem a little tense.”

Felicity releases a little half-laugh, drawing Tom’s robotic gaze, and she quiets with a swallow. Oliver’s hand settles heavily on her shoulder, squeezing gently.

“It’s okay—first night, it’s a common problem,” Tom says. “Just get some rest, and your next initiation will be tomorrow.”

“Understood,” Oliver says, his voice slightly stiff.

As Tom and Diane leave with final polite goodbyes, shutting the front door behind them, he turns to her and lifts a hand to brush across her cheek. The thumb he rests against her lips is an unnecessary reminder they’re under surveillance, but she nods beneath his touch to tell him she knows.

Then his hand skates down the side of her arm to snag her hand, and he’s leading her up the stairs to the master bath.

In the tiny room with bright pink walls and light pink tiles, Oliver turns on the sink and the bathtub, filling the room with the sounds of running water. He draws Felicity in against him, hands on her elbows, looking down into her face and speaking softly.

“We need to find a way out of here,” he says. “This is an unstable situation.”

“What _is_ this situation exactly?”

“Some sort of training to infiltrate as Americans.” He looks around at the cheap wall art and frilly lace curtains. “They must have a larger plan for that EMP than just setting it off—something long term. Maybe working undercover for some time first.”

“Oliver, we can’t leave without finding that EMP… I mean, we’re _here_ ,” she says. “And if they’re doing all this—who knows what they’re planning, and if we can stop it now…”

He huffs a breath, cupping her face in his hands. “Felicity, we are completely at their mercy here,” he says, and she can hear the tension in his voice, see it in the clenching of his jaw. She slips her arms around his waist, running her fingers up his sides.

“And we’re under like three different layers of aliases at this point—it’s like that episode of _Friends_ , you know, ‘they don’t know we know they know we know.’” At his blank look, she sighs. “Come on, Oliver, _Friends_ —that was _before_ the island.”

He’s not in the mood, giving her a severe, searching look. “Are you going to be able to keep up with this? I trust in your skills, Felicity, but…”

“But this requires an incredibly delicate art of conversation? I mean, we’re pretending to be Russians pretending to be Americans, right?” She sighs. “I don’t see that we have much choice. We keep doing… whatever this is, and we find the EMP, destroy it, and find our way out… somehow. You’ll figure it out.”

“Lyla’s in contact with A.R.G.U.S., and I’m pretty sure they’ve been tracking us on satellite,” he says. “We just have to hope they don’t decide to take out this whole place before bothering to extract us.”

“Who needs enemies with friends like that?” she mutters.  

He leans in, kissing her gently, hands still warm against her cheeks as his fingers thread through her hair. In the background, the rush of running water still fills the air, sucking down the drain of the bathtub with a churning gurgle. As she goes to deepen the kiss, Felicity realizes the rest of the house, including their bedroom, must be under surveillance, and this mission just got a lot… well, not harder, that’s for sure.

Reluctantly, they pull apart and shut off the water, lest it get too obvious. Dressing for bed in the silky nightgown provided, Felicity crawls into the sheets and tries not to search for the cameras in the room. Are these Russian freaks hoping for some free porn or something? Oliver wears a t-shirt and his boxer shorts, climbing in beside her and pulling her tightly into his arms. Their solid strength, the hard wall of his chest behind her, the tangle of his knees against her own… Somehow even in a Russian military camp, this man can make her feel safe and warm. She kisses the bicep beneath her cheek and nestles in against him.

But she’s not sure either of them will sleep for a second.

XXXXX

Felicity has never been so quiet in her life. She and Oliver walk around the house almost entirely silent, making coffee in the kitchen and exchanging only the most basic interactions, asking for mugs or negotiating who showers first. It’s nothing like the teasing, laughing routine of home, where he traps her against the edge of the counter and drags kisses down her neck while Thea walks in and gags.

She chooses the pink argyle sweater, as Oliver dresses in a pale blue polo, and she’s taken back again to their suburban summer. When they would get coupons shoved into their mailbox and go shopping at the department store, where she introduced Oliver to the clearance section. She will always love Oliver Queen in a suit—both kinds—but there was something about jeans and a t-shirt that made him, that made _them_ … real.

When Tom rings the doorbell, they look at each other and take deep breaths, and then leap back into the charade.

“We have a movie theater, a supermarket, a bowling alley,” Tom says as they walk through the small downtown area, where people smile and wave with far more enthusiasm than Felicity ever saw in the suburbs. “Agents in the 50’s kept getting burned because they didn’t know the culture, so they built this place to teach them.”

This is all kinds of disturbing, she thinks as they stop in front of a car dealership, and Tom looks at them both with a calculating gaze.

“If you’re going to be a couple, you need to look the part,” he says, and in his hand he holds a small velvet box. “Here, put these on.”

Felicity takes the box hesitantly, opening it to reveal simple wedding rings. She very carefully does not look at Oliver, taking her ring and handing the box over to him. It really shouldn’t surprise her, given the course of her life, given _who_ she fell in love with, that she would be fake-married before even being engaged. But they haven’t been together _that_ long, and the last thing she wants is Oliver thinking this ridiculous mission is giving her ideas…

Ideas she’s pretty much had since their first kiss, but still—you don’t talk about those things this early with a man who doesn’t exactly have the best track record with commitment.

But before she slides the ring on, his hand grabs hold of hers, and he’s plucking the ring from her fingers. As he slips it onto her ring finger, he looks at her, something deep and indecipherable in his eyes. Felicity just blinks up at him, uncertain if her face has gone slack because she’s deliberately suppressing any reaction or because she truly doesn’t know what to feel.

And then, before she can process, the ring is on her finger and he’s turning to put on his own. Too late, she thinks maybe she should return the favor.

The band of cold metal around her finger feels heavy around her skin, weighty with portent.

“Alright, you can head on in,” Tom says, holding up the glass door. “Your mission is to buy a convertible.”

“To… what?” Felicity asks, but peering inside, it really does look just like a car dealership. And spinning on a platform in the center is a black convertible.

“Good luck,” Tom says as she follows Oliver inside and he shuts the door behind them.

Inside, the large white room smells like new cars, like leather and polish, slick paint and windshields shining beneath the fluorescent lights. Across the room, another couple they had met last night is talking to a salesman, but before Felicity can process it all, their own salesman approaches with a broad smile.

“Welcome, welcome,” he says, no trace of a Russian accent. “Would you like to see any of our sedans? We’ve got some great deals for our Independence Day sale, low interest-”

“We would like to buy a convertible,” Oliver says, a bit abruptly, and Felicity knows he just wants to get this all over with. But they’re playing a game, here—a dangerous one.

“I just love the feeling of the wind in my hair, don’t you?” she asks the salesman with a forced grin, and then she gapes up at his short hair. “I mean, not that you need to have a lot of hair to enjoy wind, it’s a pretty universal, um, thing, just the breeze in your face is nice—except when it like whips a bug at you, but that’s what a windshield’s for, right? So we definitely want one with a, you know… windshield…”

“Oh, well, that’s…” the salesman falters, and Oliver’s arm snakes around her waist to tug her in against his side. She’s not sure if it’s affection or an effort to reign her in, but she falls silent either way.

“How about that one?” Oliver points at the spinning convertible in the center of the room. “I see it has a windshield.” His voice is tight with restrained amusement, and his fingers tighten against her waist until she squirms.

“Of course, that one, very nice choice,” the salesman says, and he leads them carefully onto the revolving platform.

After a few minutes of Oliver and the salesman exchanging stats on the car, the salesman looks at the hand Felicity is tentatively tracing along the door handle. “That’s a lovely ring you have there—how did he pop the question?” The salesman is smiling politely, but she can see in his eyes that this is a test.

“That’s, um, that’s a great question, I just love this story,” she says, thoughts clattering and crashing in her mind—keep it simple or go elaborate? What sounds like Oliver—or what sounds like this Russian version of him pretending to be American, and now she’s just confused. “We were at, um…”

“We were at home,” Oliver cuts in, softly, something subtly vulnerable in his voice. “We had traveled all over the world, but it was the home we made together that was the real adventure. I didn’t want to be anywhere else when I asked her to be my home forever.”

Now he’s looking right into her eyes, as if the salesman isn’t standing a foot away, as if they aren’t in a Russian military camp, as if they are the only ones left in the world.

“I cooked, mostly because she can’t,” he says, with a smile that shows how little he cares about that. “But I wanted it to be special, so I made soufflés—the first time I’ve ever tried something like that, and I asked one of our neighbors for help with the recipe—Amy, though I didn’t tell her why. She was mostly just amused I wanted to make soufflés, and kept teasing about trading her husband in for me if I’d have her, though she knew I was so in love with this woman, there was no chance…”

Felicity blinks through the slight blur of tears gathering in her eyes, because they _had_ a neighbor named Amy, and he _had_ made soufflés… that last night…

“I put the ring in the whipped cream on top of the soufflé, even though I knew I’d have to watch her carefully—she can’t be trusted around whipped cream,” he says, and his eyes heat with a mix of amusement and memory, and Felicity can’t help the shaky laugh of her own; she remembers the time she wouldn’t let him finish spreading the whipped cream layer on the dessert for the barbecue, and they ended up smearing it across each other’s skin and making love right there in the kitchen.

“But I think she knew, as soon as I set them down on the table, that something was happening.” Now his eyes are changing, retreating from that intimate warmth, settling now into the lies—because he never set down the soufflés in front of her, he never… “When her spoon hit something solid, she just looked at me. I was nervous, somehow I get nervous around her even when it’s the easiest thing in the world, being with her… But she just said ‘yes.’”

Felicity realizes she’s nodding, for once entirely speechless, and Oliver has locked eyes with her in a look that lingers, like the reverberations of a bass note hanging in the air.

Then the salesman is saying, in that fake tone, “I just can’t resist the charms of young love—let me see if I can get you a deal on this car.”

And she remembers they are not alone in the world—and the ring on her finger is not hers, that story is not her memory, this man is not her husband.

 _Yet_.

Her heart pounds a little harder in her chest, but she tears her eyes away from Oliver to follow the salesman off the platform.

“There’s just one problem,” the salesman says, and he has drawn them towards one corner of the room; he looks over at the other couple standing in the opposite corner. “There’s another couple interested—and I’m afraid only one of you can have the car.”

He holds out a handgun, and gives another insincere smile, though this one has a touch of real hunger in it. “Americans do love their competitions—and their guns. Good luck.”

As soon as Oliver takes it from his hand, several things happen.

The salesman turns and runs through a nearby doorway, crouching forward with hands over his head. Oliver is turning to face the other side of the room, one arm sweeping out to shove Felicity behind him, as she stumbles against the car beside them.

And a shot rings out like a firecracker, echoing loudly in the space, striking the car next to them with a shatter of glass.

“Oliver!” Felicity nearly shrieks, though she immediately follows it with a stifling gasp, hoping that breaking cover would be the least of their worries. She’s not sure if she’s trying to tell him not to kill… or _to_ kill… or just worried he’ll be struck by the bullets from across the room.

But he’s holding out the gun in one hand with an expression of fierce concentration, and when one of the figures in the other corner pops up over the hood of the car, he pulls the trigger. Blood spurts from their shoulder as they tumble backward, the gun falling onto the ground with a clatter.

Oliver strides quickly across the room, trying to reach the gun before the other half of the couple—the woman, Felicity realizes, as she stares at the fallen man crawling towards the gun while clutching his shoulder—can reach it. But as he races around the center platform, perhaps unwilling to kill this man in cold blood and hoping to disarm him in another way, Felicity hesitates beside the car and doesn’t notice that the woman isn’t actually anywhere near her fallen “husband.”

It’s when the woman leaps out from behind another car, tackling her and knocking Felicity’s head into the car door next to her, that she realizes this is a tag team event. Her cheek falls against the floor, scattering a few drops of blood across the cold tile, as the woman rises over her and pulls back her fist to strike again.

Felicity rolls to the side, trying to escape the woman’s grasp, shoving out her hands to push her away with all the strength she can muster. Struck off balance, the woman tumbles to her side, though her hand lashes out to snag Felicity’s hair and yank her head back. Felicity strikes back with her elbow, catching the woman in the face as she snarls.

Their brawl freezes when the gunshot goes off, knowing one of their men could be dead, and Felicity wants to call out to Oliver—but the woman uses her distraction to slam her head again into the ground.

Felicity kicks back, her heels digging into the flesh of the woman’s bare shins, but the triumph of hearing her screech in pain is short-lived when the woman twists to crawl on top of her. The minimal self-defense training she’s had with her boys isn’t enough against the cold precision of this woman’s training and muscular arms, and before she can squirm out of her grasp, the woman is straddling her with her hands wrapped tightly around Felicity’s neck.

As she wheezes and claws at the woman’s hands, wondering if at any moment she’ll get the right angle to snap her neck, Felicity almost— _almost_ —forgets that Oliver could be lying on the floor across the room, shot and bleeding out, or even… dead.  

So when she hears _another_ gunshot, the gasping shriek of agony caught in her strangled throat isn’t just for herself.

But the woman on top of her jerks to the side against the car, blood spurting from her waist, hands loosening in reflex from Felicity’s neck. Still coughing and taking deep, rasping breaths, Felicity crawls out from under her, as the woman groans in pain and collapses.

Then Oliver is there, hands under her armpits to gently drag her the rest of the way, leaving one high heel caught up in the woman’s clothes. His arm curls around her shoulder, her head still flopping slightly on her weakened neck until he cradles it in his elbow.

“Are you okay?” he asks, slightly desperately, and she can tell he wants to run his other hand over her—except it still holds the gun, and the woman is still moaning and shifting on the ground a few feet away.

Felicity tries to nod, eyes closing as she savors each deep inhale of breath, and she sees the smear of blood across his sleeve from what must be a cut on her forehead. Once she thinks about it, she can feel the warm stickiness sliding down her cheek.

The woman has gone still and silent, lying in a puddle of blood, and Oliver sets the gun down on the floor. His fingertips graze gently across Felicity’s throat, sliding up her jaw to wind up into her hair, and he’s taking a long breath himself as he presses his lips to her forehead.

That’s how the Russians find them, and Oliver looks up from her face with a stony glare.

But they just smile and congratulate them, like they won a prize at the local fair, like there aren’t two dead bodies in the room with them, like those bodies couldn’t have been theirs just as easily…

Like this is all just a game.

At least they’re winning, Felicity thinks, still not quite able to speak.

They don’t even get to keep the convertible.

XXXXX

It isn’t until they are back in their bathroom, with the water running loudly, that Oliver can breathe her name like a prayer of gratitude for her continued existence. With the bruises on her throat and the streaks of blood down the side of her face, she looks weary and vulnerable, and he doesn’t fight the urge to embrace her gently in his arms as though that could fix everything.

“I’m okay,” Felicity murmurs, voice still scratchy.

Oliver’s hands tighten into fists behind her back, but he just kisses her softly above her ear, and pulls back. “Let’s get you cleaned up,” he says, and he reaches for the washcloth soaking in the sink.

Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, he strokes the cloth down the side of her cheek, until the dark red stains are gone, leaving nothing but her perfect skin… slightly tinged with bruising along her cheekbone. He can tell her contacts are starting to wear on her eyes a bit, as she blinks, but without her glasses, there are no other options. When he cleans the wound itself, she flinches, and he wishes he had used that gun to take out every single one of them when he had the chance.

“Oliver,” she whispers, as he applies a bandage to the side of her forehead, just above her eyebrow. “You had to kill…”

“These people expect us—expect _me_ —to be a killer,” he replies. “There was no other option.”

“I’m sorry—we shouldn’t have come here.” Her face starts to crumple, and he curls one hand under her chin to tip it up, thumb brushing beneath her bottom lip.

“Felicity, we are here because these people are threatening our entire city.” He huffs out a breath. “I don’t want to do things that way anymore, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to do what I have to—and I’m never going to let anyone hurt you.” _And get away with it_ , he adds darkly in his thoughts, because the bruising across her skin screams at him for his failure to protect her.

She blinks, and then her eyes are searching across his face, and her expression shifts into something softer. “Oliver, that story… The soufflés…”

“Yeah,” he breathes.

“Were you really…?”

“I love you,” he says plainly, almost shrugging, because it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “And I will always love you. It didn’t take me much time to know that, so I… I just thought…”

Now her hands are up sliding around his face, dragging his lips down towards hers, swallowing the sentence fragments against her tongue.

They stand and stumble together, still entwined, towards the shower, stripping off the blood-stained clothes as though they can cleanse this entire experience from their memories just as easily. He thinks for a moment of the surveillance, of the possible cameras in the room, that even if they can’t _hear_ them they may still be able to see them…

But Felicity’s fingertips are tracing across his scars, down his chest and through the hair beneath his belly button, and then he’s not thinking about anything else.

The sound of the shower drowns out Felicity’s hiss as her back hits the cold tiles, her low moans as he circles his thumb around her clit, his deep grunt as he hoists her legs up around his waist and slides into her. He keeps his body pressed firmly against hers, so all anyone could see is his back and her knees curled up on either side of him with her heels digging into his lower spine, while his hands grip her ass firmly and her soap-slick breasts slide against his chest. He kisses every bruise on her throat, and keeps her bandage out of the path of the hot water raining on his back.

And as she comes, he covers her mouth with his hand so she can gasp out his real name against his palm.

Maybe it’s the fading adrenaline of almost losing each other, maybe it’s the ghost of the almost-proposal hanging between them, but when they slowly pull apart and look into each other’s eyes, he doesn’t care that they’re still effectively in prison or that they may have just made a Russian sex tape…

He only cares that this woman knows she’s in his life forever, that any blood spilt from her skin is drawn from his own heart, that every smile she gives is clutched tightly in his soul, that he may not have said the words yet but he is hers, will always be hers, deeper than words or rings could ever tell.

So he kisses the last panting breaths gently from her lips, and the only reason he’s not asking her again right then is because he’s not sure how they would ever tell _this_ story (even leaving _out_ the fact that it was just after shower sex)—

And then there’s a pounding knock on the front door below.

They dress quickly, with Felicity’s hair still slightly damp, and open the door to Tom holding a silver briefcase. “You said your woman was good with computers, right?” he asks, and he looks slightly more frazzled than the careful façade has ever been before.

Oliver can see Felicity’s twitching frown that this question wasn’t addressed to her directly, but he just nods and lets Tom in.

He sets the briefcase down on their dining room table. “We are scheduled to leave for America tomorrow, but we are thinking this device is malfunctioning.” The grammar has slid into Russian, though he holds onto his accent by a thread. He clicks open the briefcase and reveals a mess of wires and blinking lights, but Oliver can see Felicity’s eyes already searching across it and reading all of its secrets.

She gives him a brief look as she sits down in front of it, and he knows her almost as well as she knows these machines. This is her chance to disable it permanently—but there’s little chance they’ll get out of here alive if she does.

Tom is pacing beside the table, not paying much attention, and when his phone rings he snaps it up to his ear with a snarled, “What?” Then he pauses, a new tension freezing his body, and even though he says nothing Oliver can hear volumes in his silence.

So he’s already tackling him against the wall before he’s even hung up the phone or reached for the gun in his belt.

Felicity gasps, half standing from her chair, as Oliver leans back to punch Tom savagely across the face. The man fights back, using that military training to get in a shot to his gut, his other hand scrambling for the handgun at his waist. But Oliver feels the caged pressure of the last twenty four hours since they climbed into that van, the desperation of being trapped with the love of his life in a Russian terrorist cell, the sounds of her choking cries echoing through the car dealership…

And before he knows it, Felicity is behind him, grabbing hold of his elbow to tug him back from Tom’s limp, unconscious body. Almost automatically at her touch, he calms, taking in deep breaths and turning to her wide eyes.

“We need to get out of here, _now_ ,” he says.

“You think they know?” she asks, and he realizes she may not have read as much into Tom’s phone call as he did.

“I know you set up fake online presences, but maybe they-”

“When I said your name at the dealership,” she says, voice wracked with guilt, but there’s no time for that right now. He grabs her hand to haul her out the front door before any of the armed guards get here, but she reaches back to snatch the silver briefcase off the table.

They run out into the dark of night, lit only by streetlights and the glowing windows in the houses around them—and the spotlight swirling over the street from the helicopter roaring above them. Gunfire erupts and bursts across the ground in front of them, as Oliver drags Felicity to the side and narrowly manages to avoid the trail of death spitting down from above.

They fall against the side of a car in the driveway, little shelter as the helicopter pivots in the air, but Felicity is opening the briefcase and rapidly redistributing wires and pressing buttons.

“Maybe not now, Felicity,” he yells over the noise, though he also feels a profound sense of respect and pride, that she’s taking their last moments to finish this job.

“Russian idiots had the beta wires crossed,” she’s muttering to herself, and then she’s pressing the buttons in a rapid sequence—

And everything goes black.

The helicopter screeches with mechanical failure as it tips and spins out of the sky, crashing into a house down the block with a burst of flame. All the streetlights have gone dark, the houses falling silent, and Oliver barely has time to react before Felicity is up and grabbing the sleeve of his t-shirt to yank him into a run.

He recovers and takes charge quickly, guiding them silently through backyards and away from the confused guards scrambling around with their machine guns, and then they’re at the _non-_ electrified fence and out into the fields beyond.

Once they’re clear, he grabs her and kisses her deeply, because how many times does this woman need to save his life before she realizes she _owns_ it, completely?

A.R.G.U.S. finds them quickly, though Waller is disappointed that the EMP they recovered seems to have been completely destroyed, even if it had been functional moments before…

On the jet back to the States, Felicity huddles next to him under a blanket, head resting against his shoulder, drifting in and out of sleep as they both recover from a sleepless night and too many near-death moments.

But before she falls asleep, she blinks bleary eyes up at him—contacts taken out from her sore eyes, trusting in him to watch over her, always—and says softly, “Ask me again.”

“Hmm?” he asks, mostly because he’s struggling not to doze off himself.

“Not right now, but just… ask me again.”

Neither of them says any more than that, but the words hang between them as loudly as if they’d been spoken. He leans in, kissing her gently, uncaring about the A.R.G.U.S. agents around them.

Because his entire world is this woman beside him.

And it always will be.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!! :D


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